“Millions of Blackberry owners across Europe, the Middle East and Africa have been left without services following a server crash,” BBC News reports.
“Owners of the smartphones were unable to browse the web, send email or instant messages,” The Beeb reports. “The problem appears to have originated in a datacentre in Slough which handles Blackberry services for the affected regions.”
The Beeb reports, “The first signs of trouble emerged about 11:00 BST but seemed to have escalated with tags about Blackberry and its BBM service trending on Twitter. The only functioning service on Blackberry seemed to be text messaging, prompting many users to voice their frustration online.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Indiemuppet” for the heads up.]
Single point of failure.
About over.
Ooooh man they cannot afford this. Wow. For how many thousands will this be the final straw that pushes them to iPhone?
So their data center is in Slough?!? Pronounced ‘slow’ and means ” A stagnant swamp, marsh, bog, or pond, especially as part of a bayou, inlet, or backwater.”
Appropriate.
Presumably, that’s in Ireland, where they benefit from low corporate taxes.
It’s on the M4 motorway, not far from London. You can tell you’re close with your eyes closed, because of the smell.
It’s also the setting for the original “The Office”. I guess you could say it’s the UK’s version of Scranton.
….the Slough of Despond [John Bunyan::Pilgrim’s Progress]
“Surely, since you began to venture, you would not have been so base as to have given out for a few difficulties:”
Seems apt.
Slough – John Betjeman
‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now…’
http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/intuition/Slough.html
Cash flow is tight. But, you should have paid the electric bill for the datacentre in Slough.
So, the weak link pops up again. Did you know that, for the iPhone, it doesn’t matter how you want to use or set up your e-mail service. You don’t bring down a continent or two of your users when things go bad.
So, is RIMM an open or closed system? Or just DOA iPhone road kill. You think Apple is going to sell a few more iPhones over there?
@DMac.
It’s pronounced to rhyme with ‘cow’.
John Betjemen immortalised it in a poem from which I quote:
Come friendly bombs and rain on Slough
It isn’t fit for humans now
Think that gives you an idea of how cool a place it is.
I think this pronunciation is appropriate, as RIM is like a cow being put out to pasture… lol.
This is what their death throws look like.
‘throes’
Slough is where The Office is set. It’s a pretty shitty place…
How did such a design seem like a good idea to anyone?
Why MDN is this Mac news? It is inconsequential to Mac/iPhone users when BB messenger service is down.
I see your point, but would MDN really be MDN without a healthy dose of schadenfreude?! Surely we need a bit of that this week, right? 🙂
MDN is my one-stop shop for Apple news because it covers Apple’s competitors as well – and usually puts them in their place!
“Get a Mac!” Er, I mean, “Get an iPhone!”
I can’t believe RIM got this so wrong…
I mean it should have been obvious… 2 CEOs… 2 SERVERS… duh!
Behind almost every catastrophic IT failure is a Microsoft product. I’m therefore willing to bet that all it took was one Windows NT server bring down the entire show. RIM can rest assured that Ballmer will be releasing half a dozen new patches in addition to his offer of condolences.
RIM’s cloud took a dump? predictable. All server farms have failure points, and yes, even backups fail too.
All the more reason to doubt the integrity of anybody’s “cloud” rent-a-server salesmen. What are you going to say during the next iCloud outage? Apple’s server farm can’t offer 100% reliability. Never has in the past, and it won’t in the future.
The more services migrate away from your machine onto remote data centers, the more likelihood that a server failure will cause widespread computing outages for millions, or at least a network outage will cause data inaccessibility to thousands. That was a main reason for the PC — allowing the end user to disconnect the server leash and manage his own computing, online or offline.
This is an advantage of iCloud over Google, Amazon and many other cloud-services. Despite the (admittedly misleading) name, iCloud isn’t a streaming service, its a SYNCING service.
If Google’s cloud goes down, say buh-bye to Gmail, Google tunes, everything that they have that lives in the cloud: you can’t reach it. But if Maiden, NC goes off the grid, your local tunes, documents, etc are all still local. Perhaps you’ll notice the impact only if you edit a document on your pad and your Mac’s copy doesn’t reflect the changes. A different problem, true, but your content is still reachable.
Will iMessage not depend on an Apple service of some kind, even if not iCloud?
Good question, I hadn’t thought of. If Maiden goes out, I imagine iMessage wouldn’t work. Its the processing center, not the carriers.
I’m not sweating it. Apple didn’t build a data center the size of a regional shopping mall to underestimate demand of all this cloud stuff. And I’ve heard that they’re already hard at work on a backup replicant somewhere else.
It’s not so much underestimating demand, as not having a failover service sufficiently isolated from the main one, i.e. a faulty update to one won’t take out other nodes. I seem to remember this is what exactly what happened when MS bought out Danger/Sidekick, six months later a faulty update cascaded across all nodes and wiped all connected users’ data from their devices, without backups (because the only backup option *was* the online service).
IIRC iMessage will fall back to text if it can’t reach the Apple service, but that requires both sender and receiver iOS device have a phone number attached to it, i.e. iPod touches and Macs can’t fall back to texting.
My friend lost a poker tournament over this.
Looks like it’s crashed again today – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15243892
Ah, Slough. The armpit of England…..